Above picture: This year’s Global Birdfair theme of “Safeguarding Ocean Species” features an Antipodean Albatross
The Saving Marion Island’s Seabirds: The Mouse-Free Marion (MFM) Project will have a stand at this year’s Global Birdfair at Lyndon Top, Rutland, UK, from 11 to 13 July. Staffed by Anton Wolfaardt, MFM Project Manager and John Cooper, MFM News Correspondent with the help of Leigh Wolfaardt, we will aim to increase awareness of the project and encourage visitors to the fair to contribute to the Sponsor a Hectare fundraising scheme. Anton will also give a lecture entitled “Saving Marion Island’s Seabirds – The Mouse-Free Marion Project.” on the Avocet Stage on Friday 11 July. Leigh will be making art prints of her painting “The Albatrosses of the Prince Edward Islands” available for purchase on behalf of the project. A few copies of books about the islands donated by the Antarctic Legacy of South Africa will also be available for consultation and sale.
Prints of “The Albatrosses of the Prince Edward Islands” by Leigh Wolfaardt will be available for purchase from the MFM stand at the Global Birdfair
The 2025 Global Birdfair has as its theme “Safeguarding Ocean Species”, highlighting the Endangered Antipodean Albatross Diomedea antipodensis, a sister species to Marion Island’s Vulnerable Wandering Albatross D. exulans which is severely impacted by the island’s introduced House Mice, and most recently by High Pathogeneticity Avian Influenza (HPAI).
It will be the fourth holding of the Global Birdfair, which follows from a long line of British Birdwatching Fairs held on the edge of the Rutland Water Nature Reserve from 1989 to 2019, when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the popular fairs to a halt for two years.
Tim Appleton MBE, Director and Founder of the Global Birdfair, writes to MFM News: “I am delighted that Saving Marion Island’s Seabirds: The Mouse-Free Marion Project will be exhibiting at Global Birdfair 2025 this July. It is 25 years since a previous UK bird fair funded the first global initiative to save albatrosses and other seabirds that were being caught on fishing vessels’ long lines. The success of this conservation project helped in getting seabirds ‘off the hook’. This year’s project – Safeguarding Ocean Species – brings awareness once more to the plight of seabirds, especially in the South Pacific. Marion Island faces a different issue – that of introduced mice attacking and killing chicks and adults during the breeding season, threatening the island’s albatrosses and petrels. To create awareness of the crisis on Marion Island, Michelle Risi has written an article for our event programme this year. I look forward to welcoming the team representing the MFM Project to Global Birdfair 2025.”
While at the fair it will be a pleasure for Anton and myself to meet up once more with MFM Project’s first Patron, Peter Harrison MBE, who will be attending and lecturing on the world’s 22 species of albatrosses. On a personal note, I look forward to renewing my acquaintance with UK bird fairs, and with Tim Appleton. I met Tim when I attended and lectured at the British Birdwatching Fair with its “Save the Albatross Campaign” theme in 2000 – as leader of BirdLife International’s then Seabird Conservation Programme. A return to my roots?
Sponsor a Hectare albatross stickers on a map of Marion Island will once more be in evidence at the MFM Project’s stand at the Global Birdfair in July; photograph taken aboard the Flock to Marion Island AGAIN! 2025 voyage by John Cooper
With grateful thanks to Tim Appleton MBE for arranging sponsorship of the MFM Project’s presence at the Global Birdfair, to Christopher Blair, a birder aboard the Flock to Marion AGAIN! 2025 voyage in January 2025, who first encouraged the MFM Project to attend this year’s fair and has offered to help staff our stand, and to Ria Olivier, Antarctic Legacy of South Africa for the donation of books on Marion and Prince Edward Islands to display at the fair.
John Cooper, News Correspondent, Mouse-Free Marion Project, 14 May 2025
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Sooty Albatross, digital artwork by Jayashree Sadasivan of Artists & Biologists Unite for Nature (ABUN) for the Mouse-Free Marion Project; after a photograph by Stefan Schoombie
The Mouse-Free Marion Project is a registered non-profit company (No. 2020/922433/08) in South Africa, established to eradicate the invasive albatross-killing mice on Marion Island in the Southern Ocean. The project was initiated by BirdLife South Africa and the South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. Upon successful completion, the project will restore the critical breeding habitat of over two million seabirds, many globally threatened, and improve the island’s resilience to a warming climate. For more information or to support the project please visit mousefreemarion.org.
